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by z3t4 3448 days ago
bugs also used to be real bugs
2 comments
hk__2 3447 days ago
That’s not true. The word “bug” has been used for problems in engineering well before computers; the funny story we all heard about a moth trapped in a relay causing a _bug_ in the Harvard Mark II is from 1947. Edison himself used the word back in 1878. The Wikipedia article about “Software bug” is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#Etymology
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valarauca1 3447 days ago
For those interested Grace Hopper helped popularize this term

    In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty,
    she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation
    Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II
    and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II
    to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug.
    This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log
    book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call
    errors or glitches in a program a bug.
Reference (wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug

Reference (which wikipedia cites) http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Hopper.Danis.html

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haylem 3447 days ago
Grace Hopper (grasshopper) popularizing bugs... Can't make this stuff up.
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